Tag Archives: Valentines Day

THE MISREPRESENTED AND HYPERSEXUALIZED LATINA

Growing up, I always struggled with finding a stable identity of my own. I knew I was Latina, but I felt like I could only relate to Latina women in my family and never the ones on television and film who show how an “actual” Latina was supposed to be and act. In television programs, terms like “exotic” became the norm when describing tanned skinned, seemingly typical Latinas. Yet, it wasn’t until adolescence, when I began religiously immersing myself in pop culture, that I started to realize just how pervasive and damaging this one idea of what a Latina is actually was. Continue reading

WHY I LIKE YELLOW FEVER

I remember the first time I listened to Childish Gambino. It was my senior year, his album Camp had dropped that past November, and while surfing the web, I came across his music video for “Freaks and Geeks.” Although at first I was confused as to why Donald Glover from Community was filming himself rapping and moving sporadically (was that dancing?) around some random warehouse, I was quickly won over by his flow and his wit. Halfway through the song, one of his lines caught me by complete surprise. I paused the video and replayed it to make sure I had heard it correctly: “Love is a trip, but fucking is a sport / Are there Asian girls here? Minority Report!”.
What?! Did Asian girls just get a shout-out in a rap song?! I listened to the rest of the tracks in Camp, and there was no denying: Childish Gambino had yellow fever.

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